George Edmund Haynes (May 11, 1880 – January 8, 1960) was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918.
Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he moved with his mother and sister to New York City in the Great Migration, and lived and worked from there for most of his life.
[2] At the NUL, he was also co-founder and patron of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, an academic magazine that also published African-American literature and arts for more than two decades.
During the summers of 1906 and 1907, Haynes studied at the University of Chicago, where he became deeply interested in issues related to the migration of rural southern African Americans to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest.
He lived in New York for most of remainder of his life, while also serving for several years as professor of economics and sociology at Fisk, establishing a clinical center for the training of students in social work.
Under its founding editor, Charles S. Johnson, the journal also published African-American literature and arts, and encouraged it through playwriting competitions and related activities.
At the turn of the century, African Americans in the South, where the vast majority still lived, had been largely disenfranchised after white Democratic-dominated legislatures passed various barriers to voter registration, ensuring that the Republican-affiliated blacks were closed out of the political system.
In addition, in the early years of his term, Wilson had lost support among blacks by enabling segregation of federal offices, which had been desegregated for decades.
In the buildup of the defense industries, both black and white workers were attracted to new, high-paying jobs, and there were often tensions between them due to competition for work.
In 1918 the National Urban League held a conference urging appointment of Negro leaders to the Department of Labor; Haynes was its education secretary.
[7] With Wilson, Haynes developed a three-part program:[2] (1) organizing inter-racial committees of Negroes and whites from local bodies to promote mutual understanding and deal with problems of discrimination; (2) mounting a national publicity campaign to promote racial harmony and cooperation with the department's war effort; and (3) developing a competent staff of Negro professionals to operate the Division.
During the Red Summer of 1919, racial riots of whites against blacks broke out in numerous industrial cities during these tensions and economic strife.
Even with such opposition, Haynes proposed a major government program to help the nation's working Negroes; his vision would not be realized for many years, but he was a trailblazer.